A Representational Reconstruction of Carnap's Quasianalysis

Abstract

According to general wisdom, quasianalysis belongs to the large family of Carnap's ingenious, but finally failed contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper I want to show that this is not the case. Rather, Carnapian quasianalysis is to be considered as a promising theory of a representational constitution of scientific objects. That is to say, I intend to embed Carnap's approach of quasianalytical constitution in the framework of a general theory of meaningful representation (cf. Mundy (1986)).The outline of this paper is as follows: In section 2 I recall the basics of the quasianalytical approach, taking into consideration not only the well-known account in “Der Logische Aufbau der Welt”(Aufbau)but also a rather unknown first version of quasianalysis (“Quasizerlegung”) which Carnap developed in an unpublished manuscript written in 1923. This paper deserves attention not only for philosophicohistorical reasons, rather it contains quite a lot of interesting features of the quasianalytical approach which do not appear in theAufbauaccount.